Saturday Times

I just got back to Taipei and it's a little late already so this is going to be a short post. With any luck I'll have time to pick it up again tomorrow.

For lunch today I went to Jack's place. There he, his wife, his friend--a large, bald taxi driver who spoke so fast it took all my focus to understand what he was saying--and I sat down at a table at the back. On the table there were 6 or 7 dishes, including eggplant and basil with garlic sauce, shredded papaya salad, a dish made from wilted spinach-like greens and tiny fish about the size of toenail clippings, fried octopus and fish, Guangdong duck, and a vegetable stir-fry with cow intestine. Jack's wife had cooked the first three; I didn't try the last two. There was also a bottle of baijiu. The clear baijiu pretty much just tasted like alcohol, which with a 56% alcohol content was mostly what it was. Anyway, it was fun to taste all the home cooking while bantering in Chinese. Jack also speaks English pretty well, and that helped when we got stuck. Once, when we raised our glasses I said "gan bei!" and was informed that this obligated me to drain my cup. Thinking of my esophageal tract, I quickly backpedaled to a "l'chaim!"

After lunch I raced to the MRT to meet Ivy at Taipei Main Station, where we caught a fast train to Gaoxiong, a major city in the south of Taiwan. By car the trip would be about five hours, but with this train it only took one and a half. Ivy's twin sister, Michelle, and Michelle's boyfriend, Evan, were waiting for us at the station. We got into the car and they immediately gave me five different Gaoxiong tourist guides and a famous regional cookie. Our first destination was Lotus Pond, which looks to be about the size of Green Lake, maybe a little smaller, and is surrounded by temples. One was a temple dedicated to Confucius. It was actually sort of a park more than a temple--I'll post pictures tomorrow. A few yards off the main path, under a tree, a group of elderly people had set up a karaoke machine and were sitting or standing around it, listening to the music. Another temple had a tiger's mouth for an entrance and a dragon's mouth for an exit; going through one and out the other was supposed to bring good luck. There was also one with a giant, colorful statue of a smiling god sitting on top of it. Under one of his feet was a snake, and a dragon with the body of a turtle. According to the story, this god had defeated these two creatures and tamed them. Next to the entrance of the temple was a little tank with a huge turtle whose head actually looked similar to the dragon's head above. Bringing my face close to the glass, I noticed that the turtle's body was covered with coins.

By the time we had finished visiting all the temples it was starting to get dark, so we drove to a seafood restaurant and had a feast. This one had some similar elements to the one in Danshui: whole prawns, whole crabs, fried oysters with black pepper, and clams in the same kind of spicy basil sauce that the mussels were in last week. There was also a dish of rice noodles with pumpkin, which I enjoyed until we noticed it contained pieces of pork. Then there was miso soup with oil fish, bitter melon with egg white, and a whole fish served on a hot plate and garnished with long thin spirals of onion. For the second time in my life I saw someone eat a fish eyeball (the first time was with Stefan's family at a restaurant on Lake City Way). I hope I didn't forget anything. We washed all this down with cold green tea and Taiwan beer.

While I was still under a massive food coma, we went down to a night market near the wharf (but not before Michelle stopped to pick up a bag of dried strips of fish roe). We sat outside at a little table with plastic stools on a major intersection (but there were many pedestrians and few cars, so this didn't matter), and had shaved ice. Unlike the delicately layered frozen milk from the Shilin night market, this type of shaved ice was actually ice, covered with condensed milked and either custard, red beans, or green beans. I don't think the green beans were the same species as the variety people often eat steamed for dinner; they actually tasted a lot like the red beans.

Now seriously inundated with food, we went for a walk on the Love River (Ai He -- pronounced kind of like "I! huh?"). Actually, we went to a tea station where I got some hot Oolong tea with tapioca balls, and then we went to the river. Ivy told me that the river used to be incredibly polluted and stank terribly, but now it had been cleaned up. We passed someone playing traditional Chinese songs on an accordion. After the walk, around 9:30, Michelle and Evan drove us back to the train station.